[Gluster-users] Netboot / PXE-Boot from glusterfs?

[Mickey Mazarick]

We have a similar setup booting from gluster where it loads the os into 
a ramdrive, but there are concerns as you write logs etc since it can 
start to eat up your ram.

there is an article from slashdot that had an interesting approach (look 
under "setting up storage" halfway down):
http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/05/scalable-day-to-day-diskless-booting/

Most of it isn't applicable but they are creating a base image as a file 
and mounting snapshots of that as a loop device. You could mount 
gluster, then mount then mount the appropriate snapshot as /. You could 
even have the script in your initrd set up the snapshot if it didn't 
exist making it painless to grow your cluster.

Let me know if anyone tries this; we can help with the first half 
(getting gluster into an initrd).

-Mic

Jan wrote:
> Am 17.06.2010 13:15, schrieb Benjamin Hudgens:
>> Hello Jan,
>>
>> Our company took the approach of slurping our OS into a ram drive and
>> then mounting file system points from Gluster.  The OS becomes
>> expendable.  In our case (large amounts of dumb storage machines) this
>> is okay.  We were itching to get away from NFS.  Boot time is slow while
>> it reads directly from network ->  ram.  However, the final result is an
>> OS that is extremely fast and no NFS dependency.
>>
>> Obviously this approach is only applicable in certain situations.
>>
>>    
> Hello Benjamin,
>
> Thanks, that's an interesting idea - as long as the root filesystem is 
> not too big.
> But even then, one might be able to split it up in the most important 
> files and directories that are needed to boot and mount the 
> glusterfs-directories.
> This needs some time to figure out what are the minimum files needed 
> to boot until the glusterfs-directories are available - and a minor 
> change in the initrd (mount NFS, create ramdisk, copy files). But 
> definitely worth a try.
>
> thanks
> Jan
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